As a website design & development company, we see lots of dumb things occur when uninitiated try to practice search engine optimization. After all SEO takes time to learn and it’s no wonder that there are those do-it-yourselfers out their who think they can outsmart Google.
As a website design & development company one thing we constantly see are business owners who think they know more about what their customers search habits are than they do. They’re wrong. Keywords and keyword research is a metrics based endeavor. You may think your customers might be looking for your patio table company by typing in patio table but it pays to know for sure whether it’s patio table, patio furniture, outdoor furniture, weather proof tables or dozens of other search terms. The only way to know is to use keyword research tools such as keywordspy or Jungle Torch. Of course doing keyword research can be time consuming. That’s why companies hire website design & development companies such as ours to do the work for them.
All politics is local. And more and more, search is local. Ignoring local search is another common mistake website owners (and frankly, their website design & development companies) make. You need to use keywords that are local specific and claim your listings in the search engines’ local platforms and third party sites such as Yelp, FourSquare and others. And don’t forget to complete your Google Places profile. Actively seeking reviews and responding to negative reviews are also paramount to rising in the ranks of local search.
It’s hard to believe but there are still website design & development companies who create entire sites in flash. In addition to making everyone mad the calls up these site, because they take forever to load, it’s hard to follow the nav and there’s never any useful information, search engines can’t see flash images. Since all the text in flash is an image, that means the search engines can’t see that either. If they can’t see your site, as far as Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines are concerned, the site doesn’t exist.
If your site is built in Word Press you may notice that Word Press offers you dozen- word long URLs. Make your own. Research shows that people don’t like long URLs so when they see them on Google, they’ll click on a site with a shorter URL.
One final tip: If you have a Facebook page, take the time to use your keywords in any Facebook posts as it helps you with SEO.
